I Don’t Think We’re Getting Dumber. I Think We’re Losing the Habit of Thinking.

Our Brains Are Rarely Alone Anymore

Think about how many empty moments used to exist in an ordinary day. Waiting for someone. Standing in line. Eating lunch. Sitting in a car. Walking somewhere. Lying in bed before falling asleep.

Those moments have not disappeared. We have just become very good at filling them. There is always something available: a notification, a short video, a message, a podcast, music, news, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, a game, or another tab.

Even boredom has started to feel like a problem we should immediately fix. The moment nothing is happening, the phone comes out.

That does not make phones inherently bad. They are among the most useful general-purpose tools most of us own. But usefulness and distraction can exist inside the same object.

A 2017 study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research tested this idea in two experiments. Participants performed measures of working memory and fluid intelligence while their phones were either on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. The researchers reported lower available cognitive capacity when participants' own phones were more salient, even when they were not actively using them. That is one set of experiments, not proof that every nearby phone always reduces performance, but it is a useful reminder that attention can be taxed by more than what we consciously choose to look at.

Being reachable all the time is not the same as being mentally available all the time.

Being Busy Is Not the Same as Thinking

Modern knowledge work makes this distinction easy to miss. You can answer twenty messages, fix a bug, join three meetings, update a spreadsheet, review a pull request, write documentation, reply to a client, research a problem, and deploy something before dinner.

Every task requires some amount of thought. The day can still feel strangely shallow.

I think part of the reason is that processing and reflecting are different activities. Processing asks, ‘What do I need to do next?’ Reflection asks, ‘What do I actually think about this?’

The first keeps work moving. The second builds understanding. And reflection usually needs something our normal working environment does not provide very often: uninterrupted time.

We Have Become Very Good at Switching

A message arrives while you are writing. You answer it. You return to the document. Slack lights up. You remember another task. A browser tab reminds you of something unrelated. Eventually you are doing five things without fully remembering which one you intended to finish first.

We casually call this multitasking. Much of the time, it is repeated task switching.

The research on media multitasking is more nuanced than the internet sometimes makes it sound. Not every study finds the same effect, and association does not automatically tell us what caused what. A 2023 meta-analysis in Educational Psychology Review combined 43 studies of adolescents and young adults and found an overall negative association between heavier media multitasking and cognitive control. The association was strongest for inhibitory control and working memory, while the analysis did not find a significant difference in cognitive flexibility.

That does not mean watching a video while answering a message permanently damages your attention. A more defensible conclusion is simpler: the way we repeatedly use attention matters, and constant switching may make sustained focus harder to practice.

If most of the day trains us to switch, scan, skip, and refresh, staying with one thing can start to feel unusually difficult.

We Changed How We Consume Information

A lot of modern content is optimized around one practical question: will you keep watching?

Not: will you remember this tomorrow? Will you disagree with it? Will you connect it to something else? Will it change your understanding of the subject? Just: will you continue?

That incentive shapes the experience. A short video ends and another appears immediately. You finish a post and scroll to the next one. A headline can give you the feeling of knowing what happened without requiring you to understand what happened.

Information becomes frictionless. Frictionless information feels wonderful until you notice how little of it stays with you.

I have caught myself reading something genuinely interesting, closing it, and realizing a few minutes later that I could not explain the argument clearly. I technically read it. I am not sure I really engaged with it.

AI Makes the Question More Interesting

AI belongs in this conversation because it can make the problem better or worse depending on how we use it.

It can explain unfamiliar concepts, challenge an idea, summarize information, help debug code, find patterns, generate starting points, and expose us to subjects we would not have explored otherwise. Used well, it can be an extraordinary learning tool.

There is another mode of use. You encounter a difficult problem. Instead of struggling with it, you ask AI. You receive an answer. You paste it. Done. That is efficient, but efficiency and learning are not always the same objective.

A 2025 CHI study from Microsoft Research surveyed 319 knowledge workers who shared 936 examples of using generative AI at work. The researchers found that higher confidence in AI was associated with participants reporting less critical-thinking effort. They also found that AI changed where some of the effort happened, shifting it toward verification, integrating responses, and overseeing the task. Because the study relied on self-reported examples, it does not prove that AI directly causes weaker thinking. It does show why the way we delegate thinking deserves attention.

The useful question is probably not whether we should use AI. We are going to. A better question is which parts of the thinking we still want to do ourselves.

• Instead of ‘Give me the answer,’ ask, ‘Where is my reasoning weak?’
• Ask for competing explanations and decide between them yourself.
• Try the problem first, then use AI to review what you missed.
• Ask AI to question your assumptions instead of only confirming them.
• Verify important claims against primary or authoritative sources.

Maybe We Need Boredom Again

Boredom has terrible branding. We treat it like a malfunction. Nothing happening? Find entertainment.

But an unfilled moment gives the mind somewhere to go. You start noticing things, remembering things, connecting unrelated ideas, replaying conversations, questioning assumptions, and having thoughts that were not delivered by an algorithm.

Some of my clearest thinking does not happen while staring at a screen. It happens while driving, walking, showering, waiting, or doing something repetitive.

Maybe that is partly because those are among the few remaining places where the mind is not being handed something else to process.

We may not need more content. We may need more silence between content.

Reading Feels Different When Nothing Can Interrupt You

There is something almost strange now about reading a long article or a physical book. You notice the urge to leave. A paragraph reminds you of something, so you want to search it. Your phone vibrates. You wonder whether someone messaged you. You check the time. You suddenly remember an unrelated task.

The difficulty is not always the writing. Sometimes the difficult part is simply remaining there.

That is one reason long-form reading still feels valuable to me beyond whatever I am learning from the subject itself. You are practicing staying. You follow an argument for twenty minutes instead of twenty seconds. You let someone finish explaining an idea before deciding how you feel about it.

You encounter something confusing and keep reading long enough to understand the surrounding context instead of immediately searching for the shortest possible explanation.

That kind of attention is a skill. Like most skills, it is easier to keep when you actually practice it.

Consume Less. Interact More.

I do not think the goal should simply be to consume more intelligent content. That is still consumption. You could replace three hours of short videos with three hours of documentaries and remain almost completely passive.

A better test might be: what did I do with what I consumed?

Did I write about it? Talk to someone about it? Question it? Apply it? Look up an opposing argument? Build something because of it? Change my mind?

The difference between consuming information and learning may be what happens after the information enters your head.

Sometimes one essay you wrestle with is worth more than twenty articles you skim. Sometimes building one small project teaches more than watching fifteen tutorials. Sometimes closing the book and thinking about what you just read is part of reading the book.

A Quieter Way to Rebuild Attention

I do not think most people need an extreme digital detox. Deleting every app, buying a dumb phone, moving to the mountains, and reading philosophy by candlelight is not particularly realistic for people whose work and relationships depend on technology.

The changes can be smaller and more practical. The goal is not to become anti-technology. It is to create situations where attention has a chance to stay in one place.

• Read something long without checking another app.
• Take a short walk without headphones or a phone in your hand.
• Finish a movie without opening another screen.
• Eat one meal without watching anything.
• Keep your phone outside the room for one difficult work session.
• Research something you are curious about even when it has no career value.
• Write occasionally without publishing it.
• Try solving a problem yourself before asking AI.
• When you use AI, make it challenge your thinking instead of replacing it.

These are not rules for becoming smarter. They are ways of creating room for thought.

Curiosity Should Not End When School Does

One thing school gives us that becomes easy to lose afterward is structured curiosity. There is always another subject, another chapter, another question, or another assignment forcing you to examine something you might never have explored on your own.

Then school ends. Unless our jobs require continuous learning, nobody tells us what to learn next. For the first time, curiosity becomes mostly voluntary.

That is liberating, but it also makes it easy to stop. You can spend years becoming extremely knowledgeable about the narrow slice of information required for your job while gradually becoming less curious about everything outside it.

Learning does not have to mean another degree or certification. Read about architecture. Learn why airplanes fly. Study a period of history you know almost nothing about. Understand how coffee reaches your cup. Learn a language. Read fiction from somewhere you have never been. Take apart something broken. Build something useless.

Not everything we learn needs to become leverage. Curiosity can be enough.

Maybe Getting Smarter Is Not the Goal

I am increasingly skeptical of the phrase ‘getting smarter.’ Intelligence is not a progress bar, and reading difficult books does not automatically make someone thoughtful.

Maybe what many of us actually miss is mental presence: the ability to read something and remember it, hear someone completely before preparing a response, sit with a difficult question without immediately searching for an answer, recognize when we do not understand something, form an opinion slowly, and change it when better information appears.

None of this requires becoming a different person. It mostly requires protecting something that has become unusually valuable: attention.

The internet can give us nearly unlimited information. AI can give us nearly unlimited assistance. Our devices can give us nearly unlimited stimulation. But none of them can decide what deserves our attention.

That part is still ours.

Perhaps getting ‘smart again’ has less to do with putting more information into our heads. Maybe it starts with giving the thoughts already inside them enough time to finish.

We have more ways to fill our attention than ever. That makes choosing what not to attend to part of thinking well.